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How to make guitar practice fun again

Angela Manning Education , , , , ,
How to make guitar practice fun again

It starts out fun, but over time guitar practice can become anything but. In other words, boredom kicks in and before you know it, you’re dreading those practice sessions that you may have once given up anything for.

Of course, it’s hard to identify just why you’ve lost the fun-factor from these sessions without looking at your individual schedule. However, there are some common mistakes, and we’ll now take a look at some of the best ways to finally bring back the enjoyment-factor to these practice sessions.

The key to a fun session is trackable progress

In the words of Tom Hess, tracking progress is absolutely paramount to keeping spirits up during practice. This should hardly come as a surprise, after all, if your guitar practice doesn’t have any end goal – just why are you there in the first place?

Therefore, before each and every practice session set a goal. Better yet, if you stick to long-term goals, it can give you a sense of eagerness prior to each session.

The best practice sessions, or the most fun in the case of this guide, are performed by those people who really take their goal tracking seriously. As well as carrying out all of the above, if you can note down each and every goal on paper it just aids the tracking process, and this should correlate with your enjoyment levels as well.

It’s not all about playing – listening is key as well

As this page is dedicated to guitar practice sessions, this next suggestion might raise a few eyebrows. However, most professional teachers will insist that you give some of your time into listening to guitar-based music that you enjoy. By doing this, you can immediately spark inspiration – and then carry this out into a practice session.

The concept behind this is that you will be reminded just why you want to play guitar. In some ways, it’s a form of motivation, and if you can be motivated prior to your practice session there’s every chance that you will just enjoy it a lot more.

Learning is fun

Sometimes, we forget the reasons why we engage in practice sessions. A lot of amateur guitar players will proceed to practice the same thing over and over again – without learning anything new. Suffice to say, this approach isn’t going to do you any good whatsoever and over time boredom will kick in.

Therefore, you need to insist that each session you engage in is going to promote a new skill. It might be small, but that doesn’t matter – the point is that you are going to benefit at least in some way from it.

The new skill might be from your teacher, from an online resource or even a friend – but the main thing is to keep your sessions fresh. Some people might find that these new skills come in just once a week – it will vary from player to player.

The Magic Of Music

Angela Manning Education , , , ,

Whether your kid is a brainy introvert or an outgoing social butterfly, learning an instrument and getting involved with a collaborative project could be an amazing outlet for them to express themselves and develop social skills as well as intelligence. As with foreign languages, the earlier somebody starts to learn music, the easier it will be for them to integrate the basic ideas and perform it in a fluid manner. We’ve all read about how the plasticity of the brain is reduced as we get older.

If your kid is a bit introverted, and perhaps more drawn to the likes of Johannes Brahms or Steve Reich than say, a Jimi Hendrix or a Robert Plant, a traditional instrument of classical music, such as a flute or a cello, could be the way to go. If your child has an appetite for destruction and simply wants to shred guitar or bang the drums like Keith Moon, electric guitar or percussion could be the right choice. By the same token, people don’t always fit neatly into stereotypes, and maybe your shy, intelligent child wants to rip wild riffs on a Stratocaster. Maybe your wild child wants to learn how to play Moonlight Sonata and take a moment to slow down.

While many people who learn an instrument are autodidactic learners, children often lack the self discipline and depth of concentration to be able to focus, bear down and put in the work. It might be a good idea to hire a properly trained teacher to help your child work towards mastering a given instrument. While he or she may be enrolled in the music program at their school, these programs are often understaffed and underfunded, so that one-on-one time with a private teacher will help them move forwards in leaps and bounds that might otherwise take ages. The vacation months are an especially good time to encourage your little ones to take up an instrument because they’ll have lots of free time on their hands, if you sign them up to take music lessons this summer holiday, it will also get them out of the house and away from their iPads and videogames.

A good teacher will be attentive to your kid and find a way to make the lessons exciting. Whether the pupil wants to imitate the cello stylings of Yoyo Ma or play a fat beat to their favourite hip-hop track, their teacher should be able to accommodate them. The bottom line is that if it isn’t fun, the student won’t be compelled to practice. The magic of music is that it is simultaneously fun and educational, so that your kid can develop their brain power while having a good time and doing something that will make them feel fulfilled.

Of course, practicing is an issue and in this respect, it’s good to use a light touch; to re-iterate: music is meant to be fun; if you put to much of an emphasis of the importance of hard work and try and force them to practice, it may put them off of it forever, and this would be a shame. Again, languages are a good comparison in the sense that many of us wish we’d been raised speaking more languages rather than being limited to just English. With music, it is very similar: it’s relatively easy to pick it up when your young but becomes more and more difficult as you get older and your brain becomes set in its ways. So don’t delay, get your kid involved in music classes today and help them develop into confident, intelligent adults!

Why a Good Guitarist Must Learn about the Theories of Music

Angela Manning Education , , , , ,
Why a Good Guitarist Must Learn about the Theories of Music

If you play the guitar, you may feel as if you’re learning to play the instrument over and over again each time you want to master a new song. Or, if you feel comfortable, you can’t play a song unless the tab is right there for you to read from. Or maybe you feel you’re a good player, but you’re incapable of writing your own stuff or even improvising. If this is the case, then what you have missed is music theory. This is exactly why any good guitarist should consider taking music theory classes online.

Why Music Theory Matters

If you want to learn how to play an instrument, but you don’t want to learn about the theory, you will fail. Similarly, you can’t learn a new language without learning at least something about its grammar. Sure, you may be able to make yourself understandable, but you will never come across as a native. This is the same with an instrument. No, you don’t have to be able to explain the theory behind the Phrygian-Dominant scale. In fact, you don’t even have to know how to play it. But if you don’t even know what a scale is, then it is unlikely that you will ever be a good guitar player.

What Is Music Theory?

Music theory is about understanding what music’s most common patterns are, where they have come from, and why they sound good. All music is, is a pattern. Pick any song, for instance, and you will see that it can be reduced to just three chords on any guitar. That is a pattern that any good musician needs to know about, not in the least because it will mean that if you see the opening chord of a new song, you will instantly know which other two chords you will have to play.

Naturally, you can play the guitar, even quite well, by simply practicing the same song over and over again until you have memorized it forever. However, this is a battle you will then have to go through with every new song you learn. The theory of music is the language of music. If someone were to say something in Chinese to you, with the right amount of practice and patients, you will be able to repeat it and sound as if you are Chinese yourself. But you will never know what it means, unless you learn about that.

You should see music as a form of language, because it is. It is designed to make us feel certain things and certain ways, which is what language has been designed to do. And if you want to learn how to understand or speak a language, then you have to immerse yourself in it. That doesn’t mean going into the etymology of the last 10,000 years, but it is about understanding the key developments at each historically significant point. And the exact same is true for music as well.